Thursday, 19 January 2012

Adventures during the Age Of Aquarius - Part I

When a green girl leaves her rigid and narrow home for the first time, all sorts of things can happen, particularly if this clueless innocent moves from a mid sized provincial town in one country to a vast metropolis in another country, which has recently embraced a new, swinging age of free love, drug experimentation and above all, the birth of counter-culture and social revolution. For as long as this girl lives in the bosom of a respectable family in the new country, attends her classes at college regularly and only goes out at the weekend, she is safe. But then again, who wants to stay safe when all around the old values are breaking up and the whole world is in turmoil.

When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars

Then peace shall guide the planets, and love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius ....

I am, of course, talking about Friko's adventures in London in the late 60s and early 70s. College finished, a diploma safely tucked into her pocket, the age of Aquarius beckoned. At the time it was all wonderfully exciting, freedom at last. But freedom needed to be paid for: there was rent to find for a single furnished room in grotty student accommodation and there was also the small matter of keeping body and soul together, as they said then. Before Britain's entry into the EEC in 1973 made travel and moving between Germany and Britain easier, very few occupations were open to foreigners; we could only work as housemaids, cleaners in hospitals, or in other menial jobs, and even that required a permit.

My first legal job was at a laundry, ironing shirts. There was a whole floor of a large building devoted to nothing else but washing and pressing men's shirts. There were girls, mostly foreigners and a few poor English and Irish women, standing all day at large presses, with hot steam rising from them constantly, lifting the heavy lids, arranging the shirts on the wide ironing boards by reaching far in and stretching them tightly, then bringing the lids down again on to the shirts for an exact number of seconds. Most of the new girls had burn marks on arms and hands and if you were really careless you could burn your forehead on the edge of the lid. The current obsession with Health & Safety hadn't been invented yet. The work was piecework, you got paid per item. If you fell below a certain number of items after the initial training period, the supervisor came to speak to you to encourage you to work a bit faster. If you still showed no sign of improvement, you were called to 'the office', the encouragement turning a little more threatening. The company could afford to hire and fire at will, most of the workers were too poor to rebel and foreigners like me, who, for whatever reason, wanted to stay in the country for a while longer, had no other legal option.

I hated working at the presses. I'd never really done any physical work at all; this was me being thrown in at the deep end. I lagged far behind the other girls' output and was finally called to 'the office'. As a child I had had asthma; I promptly used my childhood illness as a reason for not being able to work at the presses. "OK", they said, "we'll switch you to the finishing line. But you'll have to have a medical examination. The works doctor will take care of that."

The finishing line was less hot and steamy. Here shirt collars and cuffs, the band at the top of backs, sleeves and pleats were finished off by hand. This was also the place where dress shirts and the shirts of people, who were paying for a superior service, were pressed. The job was no better paid, in fact, the painstaking work meant that your tally of shirts was lower than at the presses; some of the hand-pressers were really good at their work, but there were others, me among them, who achieved only creased garments, which then had to be dampened and pressed again. The supervisor kept a close eye on the slackers.

There was little camaraderie amongst the workers. I tagged along with a small group of other Germans, who, together with a group of Nigerians, men and women who worked in a different part of the factory, went for lunch to the nearest 'greasy spoon' - small cafeterias which served a very basic lunch, a few sandwiches and tea from a large urn on the counter. There were sticky buns and slices of fruitcake under a fly-blown plastic dome for those with a sweet tooth. These cafeterias were everywhere in London, thousands of them; office workers used them, as did factory and shop workers; they were cheap and cheerful, you got what you paid for, and nothing more.

I wasn't quite as dependent on my earnings at the laundry as most of the others. Whenever I was down to my last pound Mum and Dad came to the rescue; they actually still made me a small allowance, although they constantly tried to persuade me to return home. Having these extra pounds in my pocket meant that I still had money at the end of the week to buy my usual lunch, whereas some of the others had to cut back by about Thursday. Payday was Friday. Sometimes I lent a friend a pound or two. But I was by no means well-off, just a little less hard-pressed than some.

Being a total innocent, I was usually cheerful and bright and inclined to chat with all and sundry. I was also bookish and having had an education of sorts made me quite self-confident. The Nigerians fascinated me; several of them were well educated and articulate and I happily sat with them at lunch in the cafe, having the kind of conversation in which my German fellow workers had no interest. One of the Nigerian men invited me to join their group to celebrate a Nigerian national holiday at their home; although I was innocent, I wasn't foolhardy. I asked them to let me think it over. Besides, I had a boyfriend.

One of the German girls, a very thin, intense, blonde, with a pointy noise and narrow mouth had overheard this invitation. She was one of the best workers at the laundry, earning unheard of piecework rates. She and her boyfriend saved every last penny towards a home of their own, she spent almost nothing and brought her own sandwiches to work. She came to the cafe to have a cup of tea and because there was nowhere cheaper for her to go during our lunch breaks.

The place was busy, break was nearly over but most of the regulars, including other local workers were still there. As we were getting ready to leave, this girl stood up, turned to me and said, in English, not German, in a clear voice, designed to penetrate every corner of the small space: "You really need to be more careful who you mix with. And you need to stop throwing your money around. We all know how you earn it. It's all over the factory that you're the "One-Pound-Whore."

Friko. thank you so much for sharing a little bit of your life. I felt shock horror at the hard menial work you had to endure in the laundry but most of all, I felt shock horror at the loud false remarks made by that girl in the last paragraph. How dare she!! You must have felt so hurt

Ah. The nitty gritty of painful youth. I love those pronouncements . . . have all of us Sensitive Souls received them...?"It's all over that you are....." whatever insult a mean person wants to throw out.

Cow !! The trouble with remarks like that is you don't see them coming , so don't have a snappy reply .... and we were so green , all of us , then ! I think my Guardian Angel ran around after me , clucking and alarmed , for most of the '60s and '70s . Perhaps why she now seems to have taken Early Retirement . I'm looking forward to the next episode already ....

Hello:We have been riveted to the screen from start to finish of this most intriguing and saddening story. There are so many barriers in life caused by ridiculous prejudices and it always seems to us that they never disappear, they just change their faces from time to time.

Oh boy!....I'm waiting for the rest of the story. You drew me right in, although I've never worked in a laundry (or even been in one) or eaten at such a cafeteria...but I have done physical labour on a farm and been chided for my soft hands and slowness. There's prejudice everywhere.Quick - write more!

This is the best thing I've read here--I do love a post with lots of meat hanging on its bones. I am eager to read how you handled her words and attitude and challenge to self!

From a writerly perspective, I'd say there's a tension between the "free love" Age of Aquarius you open with and the ensuing Dickensian industrial crap labor scenario that you ended up in. Your personal events unfolded in a time of huge cultural transition, when there was a glimmer of change, but, as your story indicates, traditional life was still pretty firmly in place. This post reminds me of the tv series MAD MEN, which has been doing a tremendous job of showing viewers how the protagonist starts life in Depression-era poverty, moves through the war in Korea, benefits from post-war economic booms, rides his way with finesse into the 1960's...and then tries to stay current as the world changes faster than he knows how to. In his troubled daughter, we see the rumblings of the Age of Aquarius--and no one knows what to do with her. There's something powerful about connecting the dots between the historical periods that we tend to delineate in our minds. Personal life stories are the dot connectors.

Isn't it fascinating how indelible some long-ago cruel remarks can be so many years later? I certainly have my own memories of green youth in the Age of Aquarius. But OMG -- your first job and this pointy-nosed woman -- eek! So terrible!! I'm really looking forward to the next installment!

"But freedom needed to be paid for." Ain't that the truth! Nothing easy about your Age of Aquarius, was there? I'm eager to learn more. I suppose we can't hope for that co-worker to get her comeuppance . . .

Oh, wow! Now that sounds like something that would have happened to me! There were times that being open and friendly gave people the wrong impression, that's for sure. Myself--after a moment of shock, I would have burst out laughing and told her that my folks sent me an allowance. Of course, knowing me, they would have already known that long before then--ROFL! I'm just dying to hear what happened!

Dear Friko,I'm looking forward to the next installment of this time in your life. I'm wondering if the woman is envious or jealous or righteous. In other words, what do you think motivated her remark.

Your story reminds me of working at a warehouse owned by a big department store in Dayton, Ohio. I used a machine to put price tags on clothing. The pay was so miserable, even for 1971, and the young sprout of a manager so arrogant that I tried to organize a union among the women who worked there. But of course, the company would have fired all of them and they needed the job to survive. I was just doing the work until "something better" came along. So many people we have met in our lives. They have touched our lives; we have touched theirs. And we hope always that this relating was for the good.

Oh Friko, we must be close in age, as I remember well the age of Aquarius, and what I was doing at that time!

While I didn't get around to finishing college (then) I did work in a "sweat factory" sewing collars onto jackets eight hours a day . . . an abysmally boring job. I then worked for Western Electric with a sort of gun object that spiraled wires onto a circuit board. I was called into the office and accused of sabotaging their equipment. (I spent those equally boring days wearing those huge radio headphones from early 1970's and obviously not paying a lot of attention to my blueprint!)

But the strange juxtaposition of the social freedoms abounding in the Age of Aquarius being played out against a backdrop of hard work in a laundry? That's left me with a lingering bizarre mental image!!

Ah, now I understand better! Reading backwards I am! Even today, Blondie's attitude towards anyone "different" is not uncommon. Ignorance is not against the law unfortunately, and last I heard it was in as plentiful supply as ever!

A wonderful story, Friko, from a time when I too had just finished university. However I married straight after graduation and never experienced life as a young single woman in those days.

Mind you, some of the jobs I did to earn money in my university vacations were of the same hard and boring kind as your laundry. Working in the finishing section of a paint factory was the worst.. those tins were heavy!

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Benno

About Me

I was born and educated in Germany but I have lived in the UK for decades.
Before I started blogging, I had time for gardening, writing, reading, meeting friends, for poetry and literature, concerts and the theatre. I enjoyed cooking and feeding others.
Now, I do all these things if blogging permits.